PCLM-D-24-00033

Rightwing populist attitudes and public support for climate policies in Western Europe: Widening the scope using the European Social Survey

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Kulin,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jun 06 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Kim-Pong Tam

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

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a. State the initials, alongside each funding source, of each author to receive each grant.

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Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

I had the fortune of receiving reviews from two experts in related fields. It is evident from their comments that they both agreed that your manuscript has great potential to contribute to the literature, a view that I concur. Bothof them noted some theoretical and methodological issues that necessitate clarification or modification. I believe that your manuscript requires more work along theses issues. I would like to see a revised version of your manuscript and will send it to the two reviewers for further review. Please understand that I cannot guarantee any outcome at this stage.

A number of issues have been named in the reviewers' comments; please pay close attention to all of them. I want to highlight two additional issues regarding your analysis:

1) Please consider whether it is necessary to establish measurement invariance of your key measures. I fear that without evidence of invariance, the validity of any comparison between countries could be compromised.

2) Your between-country comparison analysis was solely based on intuitive comparions of the within-country effects. I wonder why the multilevel analytic approach was not taken; this approach allows you to directly estimate and test the between-country variations.

Some revision of the introduction section also seems necessary. The explanation of the pros and cons of the ESS dataset on p.3 seems to fit the method section (or just before it) better. Your hypotheses, if any, should be more explicitly identified and justified (probably just before the method section). It would also be useful if you can explain in the introductory sections whether you expected or did not expect cross-country variations.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: “Rightwing populist attitudes and public support for climate policies in Western Europe: Widening the scope using the European Social Survey” would be a worthwhile addition to the literature. It uses data from Round 8 of the European Social Survey to examine the relationship between populist attitudes and climate policy support/climate beliefs in 15 Western European nations. The focus on comparing results in individual countries as opposed to pooling the data enables the authors to establish where relationships are more stable in different geographic countries. Moreover, the authors tests of the “thin” versus the “thick” components of populism and their associations with climate change beliefs and attitudes cross-nationally is novel empirically.

Towards the start of the manuscript, I think the material could be rearranged to make a stronger narrative of the message. The third paragraph of the introduction – with the exception of the first sentence – focuses on the wrong materials. Rather than presenting the strengths and limitations of the dataset being used, here would be a more fruitful place to give a preview of the results and indicate what the key findings actually are, rather than just stating the contribution it intends to make. The strengths and weaknesses of the dataset are covered sufficiently later on in the paper (though I would add either the Round number OR the years of the survey here [and in the abstract] so that readers can situate the time period of the survey early on).

The first paragraph of the “previous research” section could perhaps be integrated into the introduction section, as it would fit in with the “what is this article trying to achieve” focus there. The “right wing populism and climate change” section could then start the literature section, but perhaps getting much more quickly to the “thin” versus “thick” sections which are most central to the manuscript. The first two paragraphs of this section focus primarily on the “top-down” elite cues which is more motivational, but it would be more relevant to go more directly to why publics with populist dispositions may be less favourably disposed towards climate policies.

The focus on Western European countries is a valid one. However, the dataset also includes some countries in Eastern Europe. Though the authors briefly mention on page 4 that political ideology may play a lesser role in climate policy preferences in Eastern Europe, they do not explicitly state why they are only looking at Western Europe. The authors should either provide a justification for why they do not utilise the Eastern European data in the dataset, or else expand the paper to empirically test the hypothesis that Eastern Europe behaves differently.

On page 27, the authors note one potential limitation of the paper is the focus on certain types of climate policies. While I agree with the authors that this does not invalidate the findings of this present study, the sectoral focus on energy policies had been something that had arisen for me when the dependent variables were introduced earlier in the paper. While energy policies are central, the energy sector is arguably among the easiest to decarbonise. Others – such as transport and agriculture for instance – have proven more difficult politically. Specifically in relation to populism, there are other climate change policies that have in recent years been specifically highlighted by far-right populists as focal points for opposition, such as the “15 minute cities” which have been presented as a conspiracy to curtail freedom. I would recommend that – rather than waiting to acknowledge this point until the end of the paper – that the authors bring up the point earlier on in the paper that support for climate policies is specific to support for energy policies and this is the scope within which this paper lies. And indeed policies related to climate change mitigation rather than adaptation. This then would still allow them to make the recommendation that future research investigates the relationship between populist attitudes and other climate policies.

Moreover, while I understand the rationale for combining these policies into a single index, the policy instruments are very different (e.g. taxes, subsidies, and bans). It would be theoretically interesting to run the models separately for each policy and to see whether populist attitudes are more consistently related to one over the other in the different countries. These could be presented in the appendix, and the results would be worthwhile there are or are not any substantial differences from using the combined index.

On pg 13, I would like to see some further clarification on the coding of the climate trends/attribution/impact index. For the trend question, one of the options is “definitely not changing”. Those who responded with this response to this question were presumably not asked the subsequent two questions given that they do not believe that it is occurring. Was the trend question then incorporated into the overall index as a three-item index? Or were these “definitely not changing” respondents incorporated in some other way?

The discussion of the left-right self placement results could be improved. When this variable is introduced, it is noted as a control for left-right ideology. However what is not discussed is what exactly is left-right ideology and what this variable captures. It might more accurately be described as left-right identify, orientation, self-placement etc. For some individuals in some countries it captures more ‘economic’ values; in others more ‘cultural’ values; and others a mix. By being more clear in what it is actually capturing (which is not always done in the literature), the authors can better interpret their results. Namely, many of the populist values that examine may themselves form part of what individuals think of when they place themselves on this scale. Therefore, to me it is not surprising that much of the variance in this variable would be explained away when these variables are introduced into the model. Thus, the interpretation on page 19 that the results suggest ‘a less robust relationship between left-right political ideology in many Western European countries than previous research has concluded’ is I don’t think warranted. Rather I think, it seems to suggest that these populist attitudes may be a key reason as to why the left-right self placement has been previously found to be consistently related to climate changes attitudes and policy preferences. This could be empirically tested by the authors by testing whether the relationship between left-right self placement is present in each of the countries in bivariate models, and – if so – whether they are explained away when the thick and/or thin components are introduced. While this is somewhat acknowledged ‘[they are perhaps subsets of a more general conservative ideology’, given that this is a key takeaway message being made from the article, it could be more tightly presented.

A final point is that – while certainly valuable – the data collection is 7-8 years old (note: data collection was 2016/2017 not just 2016 as stated in the Data and Methods section on page 11). Given the contextual changes that have occurred during this timeframe, in the discussion/conclusion sections, do the authors have any comments to make on the implications of these for the present-day relevance of their findings?

Reviewer #2: This paper examined the association between variables associated with right-wing populism and support for climate policies and climate change beliefs. While the paper has commendable aspects, such that it examined various factors simultaneously using large international data with representative samples from multiple countries, there are also notable concerns and issues. Please see my detailed comments below. Hope these help the authors improve the manuscript.

1. There were no clear predictions. The introduction adequately explained relevant concepts and reviewed previous research. However, it falls short in articulating the authors’ predictions. Therefore, the paper read atheoretical and exploratory without clear theoretical arguments and predictions. Figure 1 (titled theoretical model) merely describes the structure between the predictors without indicating the predicted relationships with the outcome variables. I suggest that the authors communicate their predictions more explicitly to provide readers with a clearer understanding of how you anticipated the predictors would be associated with the outcomes examined in the paper. For example, did you predict that the thick ideology would be a stronger predictor than the thin ideology? It was not clear.

2. Some key concepts in the paper were not clearly defined. The authors brought in quite a few concepts in the introduction but did not always provide clear definitions. For example, nativism and nationalism. How do they differ and what definitions do the authors take?

3. It was not evident why the thin ideology necessarily negatively predicts support for climate policies and climate change beliefs. Did you make such predictions? Again, the authors’ predictions were not clearly stated. Why would general distrust in political systems and politicians necessarily lead to a lack of support for climate policies? Is it the case that these people simply oppose any policies and interventions from the government? If not, why? Moreover, these variables may work differently according to political orientations. For example, political distrust may lead to opposition to climate policies, especially for conservatives if we assume that climate policies are more likely to be promoted by liberal political leaders.

4. The authors found that certain right-wing orientations, in particular anti-egalitarianism, were negatively associated with support for climate policies quite consistently across countries. Why does anti-egalitarianism matter in particular? There was insufficient discussion of these findings in the general discussion.

5. As for reporting results, while it may not be feasible to report every statistic given the number of countries studied, I recommend including key statistics in the main text to improve readability. You can include key statistics or provide statistics in summarized ways. For example, when you find overall positive effects across the countries, you can report it as a range across the countries. You can also report exceptional cases with statistics. These would enhance the paper's accessibility and facilitate understanding for readers.

6. I suggest that the authors consider expanding their literature review to include a broader range of references beyond self-citations. I saw some places where the key references were missing, or the authors only focused on their papers. For example, there are other important papers looking at the association between nationalism and environmental attitudes. These studies also show that the nationalism effect often depends on types of nationalism and national identities. The literature review in the current version is thin without considering this body of existing research.

Aydin, E., Bagci, S. C., & Kelesoglu, İ. (2022). Love for the globe but also the country matter for the environment: Links between nationalistic, patriotic, global identification and pro-environmentalism. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 80, 101755.

Cislak, A., Wojcik, A. D., & Cichocka, A. (2018). Cutting the forest down to save your face: Narcissistic national identification predicts support for anti-conservation policies. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 59, 65-73.

In addition, there are other key pieces that directly addressed cross-cultural differences in the association between climate change beliefs and policy attitudes, earlier than the authors’ papers (e.g., Fairbrother et al., 2019).

Eom, K., Kim, H. S., Sherman, D. K., & Ishii, K. (2016). Cultural variability in the link between environmental concern and support for environmental action. Psychological Science, 27(10), 1331-1339.

Tam, K. P., & Chan, H. W. (2017). Environmental concern has a weaker association with pro-environmental behavior in some societies than others: A cross-cultural psychology perspective. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 53, 213-223.

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For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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PCLM-D-24-00033R1

Rightwing populist attitudes and public support for climate policies in Western Europe: Widening the scope using the European Social Survey

PLOS Climate

Dear Dr. Kulin,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS Climate. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

==============================

The paper is a significantly improved version compared to the original submission, with substantial changes made by the authors. Kindly consider the additional suggestions made by the reviewers.

==============================

Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 31 2024 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at climate@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pclm/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Anamika Barua

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

Journal Requirements:

Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice.

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

I appreciate the efforts made by the authors to incorporate the suggestions from the reviewers on the original submission. The paper has improved significantly. However, I request the authors to consider the minor suggestions made by the reviewers to further enhance the quality of the paper.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Does this manuscript meet PLOS Climate’s publication criteria? Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe methodologically and ethically rigorous research with conclusions that are appropriately drawn based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available (please refer to the Data Availability Statement at the start of the manuscript PDF file)?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception. The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS Climate does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

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6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: The authors have taken a number of steps to address the comments raised in the previous review. The manuscript now reads better, with the revised introduction in particular standing out.

There are still some outstanding issues to address:

- That the ESS round/years have been inserted throughout the text is beneficial. Please also add either the round number or the years in the abstract too.

- I agree with the authors that there is merit in focusing on Western Europe and not all European countries in the sample. Though extra context has been added on differences between the West and the East, the authors still do not provide an explicit rationale for the focus they have chosen. E.g. “Eastern European countries are excluded due to …”. This would be beneficial, even if it is contained in a footnote, so that readers are clear on the rationale behind this decision.

- I appreciate that the authors have now signposted the mitigation focus of their climate policies from the beginning of the paper. However, while it is right that they do not wish to make too narrow a claim from their results, I still feel that further contextualisation of where these specific policies fit within the broader suite of climate change mitigation policies - and public support for these - would be beneficial. This could be earlier in the article, or in the paragraph on this part in the limitations section. In particular, they may wish to engage with Fairbrother’s 2022 article in this journal in order to situate these policies accordingly.

- The rationale for not carrying out regression analyses of the three policies separately was not convincing to me, given firstly that there are not space restrictions in the appendix where it was suggested it could go and, secondly, that research does suggest that publics do have different views on different policy instruments [for instance, see Bretter and Schulz (2024)]. While I do think this analyses would be informative, it was advisory as a means to strengthen the paper.

- The authors do expand on the use of left-right self-placement in previous research. A discussion on what the variable captures is still not present however. It would be useful for the authors to reflect on this upfront when they introduce it. This tallies with Reviewer 2’s comments on the need to ensure that key concepts are clearly defined.

References:

Bretter, C., & Schulz, F. (2024). Public support for decarbonization policies in the UK: exploring regional variations and policy instruments. Climate Policy, 24(1), 117–137.

Fairbrother M (2022) Public opinion about climate policies: A review and call for more studies of what people want. PLOS Clim 1(5): e0000030

Reviewer #2: I think the author adequately addressed the comments and feedback raised by the reviewers.

I have some minor comment: You included statistics (numbers) in the results section of the main text but did not include information about the specific statistics or indicators for those numbers, which can confuse readers. Below, for examples, without specific information, it is not straightforward for readers to know whether the effects are sizable.

"where the negative effect is sizable in a few countries such as Iceland (–0.165), Ireland (–0.129), United Kingdom (–0.109), while weaker and non-significant in the majority of countries."

Relatedly, the wording "sizable" is quite vague. I suggest that the author uses clearer wording or provides the basis the author used to categorize those effects as sizable (vs. negligible).

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

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[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Rightwing populist attitudes and public support for climate policies in Western Europe: Widening the scope using the European Social Survey

PCLM-D-24-00033R2

Dear Dr. Kulin,

We are pleased to inform you that your manuscript 'Rightwing populist attitudes and public support for climate policies in Western Europe: Widening the scope using the European Social Survey' has been provisionally accepted for publication in PLOS Climate.

Before your manuscript can be formally accepted you will need to complete some formatting changes, which you will receive in a follow-up email from a member of our team. 

Please note that your manuscript will not be scheduled for publication until you have made the required changes, so a swift response is appreciated.

IMPORTANT: The editorial review process is now complete. PLOS will only permit corrections to spelling, formatting or significant scientific errors from this point onwards. Requests for major changes, or any which affect the scientific understanding of your work, will cause delays to the publication date of your manuscript.

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Thank you again for supporting Open Access publishing; we are looking forward to publishing your work in PLOS Climate.

Best regards,

Anamika Barua

Academic Editor

PLOS Climate

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Thank you for incorporating the reviewers' suggestions. The paper reads well now.

Reviewer Comments (if any, and for reference):